Sad, doesn't begin to describe this.

We were in Makkah, December 2013, and  I came across a whole bunch of people sifting through leftover bird seed in the street.

I couldn't tell what they were doing so I went over to find out. 

Clearly somebody had put out a lot of seed, for the the birds and these poor people were collecting it for some purpose.

Could they actually be so poor that they were taking home bird seed to their children.

That would indeed be too sad. 

When  I saw that they were being very careful and selecting a nugget here and there with great care I was very curious. 

I then went up to one of them and tried to get the real story. The "scoop" as they say.  

What he told me was more shocking even, than the thought that they were eating bird food because they were hungry. 

It seems that as this was in the vicinity of the Haram (Grand Mosque) , they believed that the seeds that the birds rejected, the half bitten kernels had great healing power (shifa) and they were meticulously finding the half bitten seeds to take back to their sick. 

Like I said, the actual story was much more tragic than anything I could have imagined.

This desperation  was far worse.